Witness History
Episodes
Bush v Gore: The 'hanging chads' US election of 2000
25 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The US presidential election of 2000 was one of the closest and most contested in history. It was more than a month before the result was decided aft...
Blackwater killed my son
24 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On 16 September 2007 private security guards employed by the American firm Blackwater opened fire on civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. Seventeen I...
When Nelson Mandela went to Detroit
23 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Just months after his release from prison in 1990 the South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela toured the USA. One of the eight cities he went to ...
How Liberia wrote off its debts
22 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How the Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was negotiated to write off billions of dollars of debt, accumulated over two decades of civil war. C...
The Galileo project
21 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Galileo mission to examine the planet Jupiter had its beginnings in the 1970s. It finally came to an end on 21st September 2003. Professor Fred Ta...
The mothers of Argentina's disappeared
18 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In April 1977 a group of women in Argentina held the first ever public demonstration to demand the release of thousands of opponents of the military r...
Tank Man
17 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A photo of a man confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square in Beijing caught the world's imagination. Carrying two plastic shopping bags, unarmed and alo...
The Mau Mau struggle against British rule
15 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During the 1950s in Kenya, armed rebels known as the Mau Mau fought against British rule. Thousands were taken captive and interned in camps by the Br...
Resisting 'Europe's last dictator' in Belarus
14 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For more than 20 years, people in Belarus have been protesting against the authoritarian rule of President Alexander Lukashenko - who's been dubbed Eu...
Why the US rejected universal healthcare
11 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The USA is the only rich democracy not to provide universal healthcare. After WW2 US President Harry Truman was horrified that only a fifth of all Ame...
Banning alcohol in an Indian state
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Punyavathi Sunkara recalls how she campaigned to stop the sale of alcohol in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to protect women from domestic violenc...
The birth of Reddit
09 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Steve Huffman had been programming software since he was eight-years-old. At the University of Virginia, he met his future business partner, Alexis Oh...
The Dawson's Field hijacking
09 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Barbara Mensch recalls how she was hijacked and held in Jordan by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in September 1970. Barbara’s pla...
Haiti's cholera outbreak
08 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In October 2010, Haiti was hit by an outbreak of cholera, the first in recent history of the impoverished Caribbean nation. Nepalese peacekeepers belo...
Care in the Community
04 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1990s Britain closed down many of its long-stay hospitals and asylums and their patients were sent to new lives in the community. But the trans...
The Cape Town bombings
03 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Between the late 1990s and 2002 there were more than 150 bomb attacks in the South African city of Cape Town. The authorities blamed them on a group k...
The birth of the Sony Walkman
02 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The portable cassette player that brought music-on-the-move to millions of people was launched in 1979. By the time production of the Walkman came to ...
Flying through a volcano
01 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When a British Airways flight carrying 248 passengers took off one evening in 1982 heading from Kuala Lampur to Australia, everything seemed fine. Bu...
Inventing James Bond
31 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The author Ian Fleming created the fictional super-spy, James Bond, in the 1950s. Fleming, a former journalist and stockbroker, had served in British ...
Who has the right to vote in America?
28 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights-era electoral law was designed to protect African-American and other minority voters. It was in...
St Kilda
27 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1930 the last inhabitants left their homes on the remote Scottish islands of St Kilda. It was the end of a traditional Gaelic-speaking commu...
Occupy Wall Street
26 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2011, the Occupy movement staged demonstrations against financial inequality across the world. The biggest was in New York, where a retired police ...
America's first woman combat pilot
25 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1993, Jeannie Leavitt became the first woman to fly a US Air Force fighter plane after the Pentagon lifted its ban on female pilots engaging in com...
Margaret Ekpo - Nigeria's feminist pioneer
24 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One of the leading figures in Nigeria's fight for democracy was Margaret Ekpo, a feminist politician and trades union leader. After Nigerian independe...
The siege at Ruby Ridge
21 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Randy Weaver was a white separatist in Idaho in the north-west United States who was wanted by the government on firearms charges. When government age...
The American who put women's rights in the Japanese constitution
20 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In November 1946, Emperor Hirohito proclaimed a new post-war constitution for Japan which contained clauses establishing women's rights for the first ...
The Guatemalan syphilis scandal
20 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A team of American doctors, led by the distinguished physician Dr John Cutler, carried out secretive STD tests in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. The doc...
The first modern asthma inhaler
19 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Asthma affects more children than any other non-communicable disease - and it was a teenager who first asked her father "why can't they put my asthma ...
The lost King of England
18 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2012, archaeologists from the University of Leicester discovered the lost grave of Richard III under a car park in Leicester. Richard was the King ...
Surviving Saddam
17 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Zainab Salbi grew up in the inner social circle of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in the 1980s because her father worked as Saddam’s personal p...
The invention of the modern ventilator
14 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1952, the Blegdam Hospital in the Danish capital Copenhagen was overwhelmed by hundreds of seriously ill polio patients. During the first we...
Scoring a victory for women's rights in Turkey
13 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2004 feminist campaigners in Turkey forced a radical change in the law on crimes against women. The overhaul of the country's 80-year-old penal cod...
Beirut's Hotel War
12 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
At the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, Beirut’s luxury hotel district was turned into a battlefield, with rival groups of gunmen holed up i...
Bremen’s Elephant Statue
11 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Amid the ongoing debate about how to handle historical monuments which commemorate colonialism and slavery, Witness History hears the story of a giant...
Radar and World War Two
10 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During World War Two, British women were employed as operators of a top-secret radar system for detecting aircraft. The new technology had helped shif...
The atomic bombs dropped on Japan
06 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The USA dropped its first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th 1945. Three days later a second atomic bomb was detonated over N...
The battle of Midway
05 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On 4th June 1942, aircraft carriers of the Japanese and American fleets fought a huge naval battle near Midway Atoll in the Pacific. The outcome marke...
The internment of Japanese Americans
04 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Thousands of Japanese Americans were sent to prison camps after the USA entered World War Two following the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Whole families f...
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
03 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On 7 December 1941, Japan launched a surprise strike on the American naval base, Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. Thousands of American servicemen were killed...
The death of Heinrich Himmler
31 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One of Hitler's most important henchmen was caught by British troops in the chaos of post-war Germany just after WW2 had ended in Europe. A British so...
Benidorm and the birth of package tourism
30 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Spanish town of Benidorm is now one of the world's most popular holiday resorts - receiving more than 10 million visitors a year. The hotels and s...
Adrift for 76 days
29 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A remarkable story of survival. In 1982, Steven Callahan was sailing alone across the Atlantic when one night his yacht hit something in the water and...
Australia's 'Black Saturday' bushfires
28 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The forest fires of 2019-2020 in Australia were the worst the country had ever experienced - but ten years earlier Australia had a foretaste of that d...
The writer who put Latinos centre stage
27 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Cuban-American Dolores Prida wrote with a distinctive voice in her plays, newspaper columns and as an agony aunt in the Latina magazine. She chall...
The fastest vaccine ever developed
24 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1960s five-year-old Jeryl Lynn Hilleman got ill with mumps. Her father Dr Maurice Hilleman took a swab from the back of her throat and used it ...
The first safe house for Afghan women
23 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2003 the first refuge for women fleeing violence and abuse was opened in Kabul, Afghanistan, a country that has been labelled one of the most dang...
The struggle to save Borneo's rainforests
22 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The rainforests of Sarawak in Malaysia on the island of Borneo are some of the richest and most biodiverse ecosystems on earth - but for decades they'...
The Million Man March
21 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On 16th October 1995 hundreds of thousands of African American men marched on Washington D.C. in an attempt to put black issues back on the government...
The man who tried to kill Hitler
20 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On 20th July 1944 Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg put a bomb under Adolf Hitler's desk. Although the bomb exploded, it failed to kill the German Nazi l...
South Korea's 1980s prison camps
17 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A so-called Social Purification project led to thousands of ordinary citizens being imprisoned under the military government in South Korea in the 198...
The scandal of Liverpool's missing Chinese sailors
16 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During World War Two, thousands of Chinese sailors and engineers served in the British Merchant Navy, keeping supplies flowing into the port of Liverp...
Returning Ethiopia's looted history
15 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Stele of Axum, a 4th century Ethiopian treasure, was finally returned by Italy in 2005. It had been taken from the ancient town of Axum in norther...
How Club Med changed holidays
14 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Holidaymakers arrived at the first Club Med resort on the Spanish island of Majorca in summer 1950. The French company - full name Club Méditerranée...
The fight for women's prayer rights in Israel
13 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1988, a group of Jewish feminists demanded the right to pray as freely as Jewish men at one of Judaism’s holiest sites. They called themselves th...
The 1960s report that warned the USA was racist
10 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 1967 more than 100 cities in America were caught up in riots. US Senator Fred Harris urged the President, Lyndon B Johnson, to inves...
The death of Frida Kahlo
09 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The great Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, died on July 13th 1954, at the age of 47. The art critic, Raquel Tibol, lived in Frida's house during the last ...
Montreal's 'Night of Terror'
08 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When Montreal's police force went on strike for one day over pay in 1969, there was looting and rioting in the streets. But the city's problems leadin...
The unlawful death of Christopher Alder
07 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The black former soldier choked to death in handcuffs on the floor of a British police station in 1998. CCTV footage taken from the police station sh...
The doctor who discovered how cholera spread
06 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1800s cholera was a mysterious disease killing millions around the world. No-one knew how to stop it till an English doctor, John Snow, began ...
How South Africa banned skin-lightening creams
03 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1990, South Africa became the first country in the world to ban skin-lightening creams containing the chemical compound hydroquinone. For years the...
The lost Nazi-era art trove
02 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2012 a stunning, secret collection of art was found in Germany. Much of it had disappeared during Nazi rule in the 1930s and 40s. It had once belon...
Quarantined in a TB sanatorium
01 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What it was like to be a child quarantined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in the 1950s. Ann Shaw was nine when she was first admitted to th...
The Rolling Stones drugs trial
30 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards went on trial for drugs offences in June 1967. The case attracted attention around the world, and sealed their reputati...
Jana Andolan – Nepal’s people power movement
29 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A people’s movement called Jana Andolan brought an end to Nepal’s absolute monarchy in the spring of 1990. Political parties worked together with ...
Russia’s bitter taste of capitalism
26 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Chaos and hardship hit Russia with the rapid market reforms in early 1992, just weeks after the collapse of the USSR. In 2018 Dina Newman spoke to on...
The Chilean economy and its 'Chicago Boys'
25 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Following the violent military coup that overthrew Chile's socialist government in 1973, the new regime led by General Augusto Pinochet began a radica...
Tanzania's socialist experiment
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1960s Tanzania's first post-independence president, the charismatic Julius Nyerere, believed that endemic poverty in rural areas could onl...
South Korea's economic miracle
23 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
An eyewitness account of how a poor, war-ravaged nation became a global economic powerhouse. We hear the memories of Dr Kongdan Oh, who grew up in Sou...
The New Deal
22 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When Franklin D Roosevelt became President in 1933 he promised to spend his first 100 days rescuing the USA from the Great Depression with one of the ...
The ‘Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes’ anti-racist exercise
19 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, US school teacher, Jane Elliott, decided to try to teach her all-white class about racism. She d...
The friendship train
18 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The passenger train service between India and Bangladesh was resumed after more than 40 years. The train service had been suspended after the 1965 war...
Sex trafficking and peacekeepers
17 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1990s, whistle-blowers implicated UN peacekeepers and international police in the forced prostitution and trafficking of Eastern European ...
Beethoven's role in China's Cultural Revolution
16 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During the early years of Cultural Revolution in China, all European music was banned. Even enjoying traditional Chinese music and art was illegal. An...
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the Five Stages of Grief
15 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. When Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published her bestselling book On Death and Dying in...
Three Strikes Law
12 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One man's experience of the controversial US law that saw thousands locked up for life. Under the law in California, a third conviction for a felony o...
Rodney King and the LA riots
11 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
People took to the streets of Los Angeles in fury after police, who had assaulted a black driver called Rodney King, were acquitted in 1992. His assau...
Black basketball pioneers - Texas Western
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1966, an all-black team went head-to-head with an all-white team for the National College Basketball championship - one of the biggest prizes in Am...
The 16th Street church bombing
09 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Four young black girls were killed in a racist attack on a church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. The 16th Street Baptist Church was a centre for civ...
Brown v the Board of Education
08 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled that the segregation of public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. The case was a turning point in t...
The portable defibrillator
05 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1960s, doctors in Northern Ireland launched the world’s first mobile coronary emergency service using a new invention – the portable defibr...
The origin of the WHO
04 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The WHO was first proposed as part of the new United Nations programme to reform the post-war world. The idea for an international health organisation...
How Christo wrapped the Reichstag
03 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The artist Christo died on May 31st 2020. Famous for wrapping landmarks in fabric and plastic, one of his most ambitious projects was the former Germa...
The Zanzibar Revolution
02 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Just one month after gaining independence there was an uprising in Zanzibar in 1964. It was billed as a leftist revolution but the worst of the viole...
The start of eco-tourism
01 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Monteverde cloud forest reserve in Costa Rica was established in the 1970s with the help of a group of American Quakers. The aim was to protect i...
Ann Lowe - African American fashion designer
29 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ann Cole Lowe designed Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress in the 1950s. As a black woman working in high fashion she was a groundbreaking figurein New Yo...
Winston Churchill's doctor
28 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Many people were shocked when Winston Churchill's personal doctor published his memories of Britain's wartime leader in 1966. Churchill's family tried...
The Gwangju massacre
27 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The South Korean army crushed a popular uprising in the city of Gwangju on 27 May 1980. Pro-democracy demonstrators had taken control of the city and...
The book that changed the way we eat
25 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The best selling book that highlighted the health and environmental benefits of a plant based diet. The publication of "Diet for a Small Planet" in 1...
Britain's World War Two crime wave
22 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During times of crisis in the UK, World War Two is often remembered as a period when the country rallied together to fight a common enemy. British pol...
Explaining autism
21 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ground-breaking work by developmental psychologist Professor Uta Frith has revolutionised our understanding of autism. Beginning in the 1960s, Profess...
The first 3D printer
20 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1983 Chuck Hull invented the first 3D printer. It could produce small plastic objects directly from a digital file on a computer. Instead of using ...
Kowloon Walled City
19 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A unique way of life came to an end in Hong Kong in 1993 when Kowloon Walled City was demolished. When the rest of Hong Kong was a British colony, the...
The Miami riots
18 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
After four white policemen were acquitted of killing a black man - Miami rioted. Citizens took to the streets on the night of May 17th 1980. The unres...
Sweden's fishy submarine scare
15 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The story of a scientist who helped solve a Cold War mystery involving flatulent fish and Soviet submarines. During the Cold War, foreign submarines i...
Confessions of a Prince
14 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Over a period of four years before his death in December 2004, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the consort and husband of former Queen Juliana, ga...
Fighting for the pill in Japan
13 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
After decades of campaigning in Japan, the pill was finally legalised in 1999. In contrast the male impotency drug Viagra was approved for use in just...
The first 24-hour children's helpline
12 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How a group of broadcasters and social workers in the UK set up the world’s first 24-hour telephone counselling service for children. It revealed ju...
The liberation of the Channel Islands
11 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The only part of the British Isles to be occupied during World War Two was liberated when the German army surrendered in May 1945. The Channel Islands...
VE Day
08 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On the 8th of May 1945, hundreds of thousands of Londoners took to the streets to celebrate the end of the Second World War in Europe. BBC corresponde...
The Soviet occupation of Berlin
07 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
After Germany's surrender to Allied forces in May 1945 Soviet soldiers occupied the German capital Berlin. For ordinary German citizens it was a time ...